“They’re sickening.”
“And all this booze? I don’t think they’re serious about the freeze. Do you?”
“I think they’ve been corrupted.”
“Bourgeois.”
“Yeah.”
Tarp wriggled into his trousers and slid the .22 under the shirt, which he left lying under the palm stumps.
“Do you think they’ve betrayed the revolution?” the girl was saying.
“Don’t talk so loud.”
“Well, do you?”
Tarp stood up. Even barefoot, he towered over them, the low, sandy ridge giving him more height. The girl saw him first and her mouth opened in a perfect circle. It was small and soft and pink, like a baby’s, and it stayed opened, looking astonished.
“Comrades,” Tarp said. He walked down the sand hill toward them. “Comrades both!” He tried a Russian accent and it came out like Repin’s voice.
“Comrade?” The girl had taken the boy’s hand and they both looked terrified of him.
“Comrades,” Tarp said again. His mind was jumping ahead: here he had two people who would not question his identification and who had no Committee for the Defense of the Revolution to which to report. “Comrades, I am not being able to help overhearing what you are saying next to me while I am enjoying the Cuban sunshine on my visitation to this lovely island.” He smiled. His smile was never very jolly, and it sometimes was worse than his frown. It had the effect of moving the girl closer to the young man, and her mouth opened a little wider. She had no makeup on, except around her eyes, and she looked about fifteen. “You are Americans?”
“We’re here for the freeze,” the young man said. “The International Friends of the Nuclear Freeze Movement.”
“Ah. Yes?” Repin had said something about the freeze movement as a reason for the ballet troupe’s being there. “Ah. I, too.”
“You’re here for the freeze day?” the girl said with what seemed to be suspicion. It might simply have been disinterest.
“Ah, in a manner of talking. Yes. You have transport, have you, back to Havana?”
“The bus, yeah,” the boy said. The girl frowned up at him. “Don’t you have transportation?” she said. Now she sounded quite suspicious. Perhaps she had a CDR block group, after all.
“Of course!” A bus. What kind of bus would they take back to Havana? And how was he going to get on it without any money? “You took bus all the way out here from Havana, my friends?”
“It’s a tour,” the boy said.
“Everything’s a tour,” the girl added.
Tours meant tour guides; tour guides meant intelligence agents, or reports, at the very least. He began to regret speaking to them. “Well, I have to go, Comrades,” he said. “I have an appointment.” As he turned away, the boy said quickly, too loudly, “We weren’t complaining, you know!”
“Oh, Rick!” the girl muttered.
Tarp turned back. “You are worried about what I will say I heard, my friend?”
“No, no. I just wanted to be straight with you. You know. We were just having a private, uh, conversation. About all the great things they’ve done for us. It’s a great tour. Really.”
“Oh, Rick!” the girl said. Her voice was nasal. She faced Tarp, pink with defiance. “Actually, we were bitching a lot!” she said. “You heard us, right? So why pretend? We’ve never been to Cuba before, we wanted to see how the revolution works, and they keep taking us to nightclubs, and they keep giving us booze, and they keep showing us apartment houses, and… We just came to demonstrate for world peace, you know?”
At the edge of his vision, Tarp saw another figure approaching along the same route that the two Americans had taken to the beach. He wanted to kick himself for getting into such a stupid situation. Yet, being in it, he had to stay with it. He tried to frown as Repin did, and he tried to make his voice even more like Repin’s as he said, “Comrades, is wrong to question the judgment of the people’s representatives. Who are you, to reject nightclubs when workers all over Cuba dream of nightclubs? Who are you, but children of the bourgeoisie, looking for the titillations of playing at workers? Who are you, but decadent Americans, still hand in hand with Rockefellers and United Fruits, sneering at the nightclubs of the twenty-sixth of July? Who are you” — he said, his voice rising as he heard footsteps crunching over the palm fronds — “but the offspring of the middle class, trying to satisfy corrupted urges by playing at work while you sneer at the pleasures of the workers? Shame, I say. Shame, Comrades! Do not criticize until you have earned the right to criticize!”
“Bravo,” a firm voice said behind him. Tarp turned slowly and tried to look surprised. “Bravo, Comrade.” She was quite sincere. She was also tall, strong, dark, strikingly handsome. She put out a brown hand. “Juana Marino.”
Tarp tried to think. He had already made a Russian of himself; the French identity was no good. Too smart! “Yegor Solkov,” he said.
“You are Russian?” she said in Russian.
“Most assuredly.”
“Thank you for what you said,” she told him in lightly accented Russian. “These two have done nothing but complain since they landed.” She smiled at the Americans as if she had said something complimentary about them.
“They are children,” he said. “Your guests?”
“I am their guide. From the Bureau of Tourism and Solidarity.”
“Of course. You have a group?”
She nodded. “Thirty. We are here looking at the cement plant. All but these two. It is hard to know what they want. Machine guns and urban revolution, perhaps. They do not seem to understand that Cubans like nightclubs and baseball, and that cement plants and furniture factories are necessary to us.”
“Maybe they want to see spies and counterrevolution and another Bay of Pigs,” Tarp said. He laughed. The woman laughed, too. It was a beautiful laugh, musical and open. She glanced at her watch.
“Time to wipe their noses?” Tarp said in Russian.
“You are a bad man,” she said lightly. She was still laughing. She was very flirtatious, he saw, perhaps habitually so. It would have been flattering to think that she did it only for him.
“You must go back to the bus,” she said to the two Americans in English.
“We just wanted to take a walk!” the girl protested.
“And you made the group lose time.”
“Well, the group has made us lose enough time.”
Juana Marino was very cool. “Individualism is an aberration,” she said. She made it sound like a quotation. “Please go back to the bus now.”
Tarp walked up the beach and squeezed his feet into his damp canvas shoes. He bent down and pushed the .22 into the front of the cotton trousers and buttoned his shirt so that the square-cut tail hung out all around. It was an old short-sleeved shirt with epaulets that looked vaguely military and that had been made in Africa years before. He thought it would pass in Cuba.
“Are you going back to the road, Señor Solkov?” the beautiful guide called to him. She was standing by the path that led away from the beach, just where she might have been able to see what he was doing if she had wanted to.
“I was waiting for a friend,” he said.
“Here?” She sounded as severe as a schoolteacher. Tarp thought of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, and of tour guides, and of the intricate systems of surveillance that made everybody a spy on somebody here.
“No,” he said. He gestured vaguely. “Out there.”
“Well, won’t you walk with me, then?” she said. She sounded flirtatious again.
Tarp reached her side in half a dozen running strides. The two Americans were ahead of them, and Tarp and the beautiful Cuban woman came behind like parents herding their children homeward after a day at the beach.